Adding icons to your reports not only looks better, but actually helps your readers retain information. I learned about this easy fix from Ann Emery’s amazing class “Great Graphs”, which I highly recommend (more at the end of the post).
Sometimes ‘serious’ evaluators or researchers brush off these techniques as being too warm and fuzzy, and feel it is more professional to present everything like a journal article. I feel that these techniques can actually make your presentations look MORE professional, in addition to ensuring that people actually read your report.
Imagine a quick summary box like this one. Adding text boxes like this one can help break up your reports and draw the reader to the important conclusions. Still, as is, it’s a wall o’text:
First thing: break this into bullet points. Bullets are much easier to read and give the user immediate information — you can quickly see there are three major points.
Now, we’ll add some icons. But first, we need to get rid of those bullet points we just so carefully added. We’ll keep the spacing the same, but make the bullet points invisible, so they won’t interfere with the graphics.
I’m assuming you’re writing this report in Microsoft Word—so here’s what to do:
- Highlight your bullets, right click, and go to “Bullets and Numbering”.
- Click “Customize…”
- Click “Font…”
- Under “Effects”, click “Hidden”
Now your box should look like this:
Let’s replace that empty space with icons!
- Go to Insert->Icons
- Scroll through the icons or search for something specific (see examples below!)
- Choose 3 icons that go with the above message and insert.
- Choose each icon, right click, and go to “Wrap Text”; choose either “Square” or “In Front of Text” – this will help keep your formatting in line.
- Now, move to the text, and voila!
Check out Ann at Depict Data Studio. At time of publication, her Great Graphs course was not open, but she’s got other options.